Just recently, I thought about how maybe I should have kept using the synthesisers more after 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence'; then, I would have been a more unique soundtrack composer than I am now. It could have been my signature. But then, probably, Bertolucci would not have offered me to compose for his films.

The 'Story of Silent Night', which was given to me one Christmas when I was six - it was the story of a down and out composer who had no ideas left, and it was Christmas, and he came up with the hymn 'Silent Night.'

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

I am but an architectural composer.

Books are a gateway. A black hole of endless possibilities. A place where soulmates meet and friendships thrive. A place where villains might proposer and heroes could fall. Here, worlds begin and reality fades. Here, lies imagination.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines-well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads-that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco-the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

Losers sulk; posers talk; winners walk - choose wisely.

God is the composer; you are the song.

The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his Inspirational. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

On ne peut opposer absraitement le spectacle et l'activit? sociale effective.

Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.

Nothing does reason more right than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

The first year I started in San Francisco there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

Now I can do no more. We must trust to the Great Disposer of all events and the justice of our cause. I thank God for this opportunity of doing my duty.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics Brahms so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Since the composer has said everything if you discover everything it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish it is his idea I am embellishing.

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann his favorite composer in Torn Curtain after the bitter fight between them.

Nature I have constantly argued in my work is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate randomly recarving geography over 10 000-year epochs.